Three Cheers For Oil

Oil is the Earth’s miracle substance. Robert Bryce exposes the foolishness of those who attack oil. Links in original:

The International Energy Agency recently reported that global oil demand grew by 2.3 million barrels per day in 2023. The agency expects oil use to increase by 1.2 million Bbl/d this year. Meanwhile, OPEC expects oil use to jump by 2.2 million Bbl/d and by 1.8 million Bbl/d in 2025. Regardless of which estimate is correct, it is clear that oil demand continues to grow along with the global economy. Analyst Art Berman says “oil is the economy.” Indeed, like electricity, oil drives economic growth, and economic growth drives oil use.

Love it or hate it, if oil didn’t exist we’d have to invent it. No other fuel can match oil when it comes to energy density, cost, scale, flexibility, or ease of handling and transportation.

Petroleum drives modern economies, which is to say that it enables modern life. But for petroleum, we would be going around in donkey carts. And not going very far. America’s need for oil is insatiable; nothing can dent it, even temporarily, but an economic downturn. And bear in mind that throughout the time covered by this chart, automobile engines have gotten much more efficient:

The world’s demand for oil is also insatiable, and that isn’t going to change:

Petroleum is the key to lifting billions of people out of poverty. Robert writes:

Few substances this side of uranium come close to touching oil when it comes to the essential measure of energy density: the amount of energy (which is measured in joules or BTUs) that can be contained in a given volume or mass. In addition to petroleum’s high energy density, it is stable at standard temperature and pressure, relatively cheap, easily transported, and can be used for everything from making shoelaces to fueling jumbo jets.

Speaking of which:

Oil’s tyranny of density can be demonstrated by looking at the aviation sector and by doing a tiny bit of math. To make the math easy, let’s use metric units. And let’s focus on weight, as that factor is critical in aerospace. The gravimetric energy density of jet fuel is high: about 43 megajoules (million joules) per kilogram. (Low-enriched uranium, by the way, is 3.9 terajoules — trillion joules — per kilogram.)

Keep those numbers in mind as we look at the best-selling jet airliner in aviation history: the Boeing 737. A fully fueled 737-700 holds about 26,000 liters of jet fuel, weighing about 20,500 kilograms. That amount of fuel contains about 880 gigajoules (billion joules) of energy. The maximum take-off weight for the 737-700 is about 78,000 kilograms, therefore jet fuel may account for as much as 26 percent of the plane’s weight as it leaves the runway.

Obama and Kennedy are big fans of electric cars. Lithium-ion batteries have higher energy density than most other batteries, holding about 150 watt-hours — 540,000 joules — of energy per kilogram. Recall that jet fuel contains about 43 million joules per kilogram, or nearly 80 times as much energy. Therefore, if Boeing were trying to replace jet fuel with batteries in the 737-700, it would need about 1.6 million kilograms of lithium-ion batteries. Put another way, to fuel a jetliner like the 737-700 with batteries would require a battery pack that weighs about 21 times as much as the airplane itself.

It isn’t going to happen. Ever. Petroleum will not be replaced by wind, solar and batteries. Ever. It could be replaced by nuclear power, but we have a long way to go before that happens. Meanwhile, let’s celebrate oil, which has done more to improve human life than all the liberal measures enacted by all governments in history, put together.

The Best Climate Beatdown of the Year (So Far)

Watch the president of Guyana, which is developing a huge new oil field (which Venezuela is threatening to invade in order to seize), open up the biggest can of whoop-you-know-what on a smug, supercilious BBC “reporter” (about 2 delicious minutes long):

Chaser—a pertinent question from an acquaintance of mine in Budapest:

Reminder: You may think you hate the media, but you don’t hate them enough.

Bonus—my nominee for Tweet of the Day:

The Daily Chart: How Much More Juice?

The Wall Street Journal warns today of “The Coming Electricity Crisis,” as “Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.”

Here’s what some of these projections look like:

For the climate cult, electricity shortages are a feature, not a bug.

Down With Israel!

From Foreign Policy magazine comes a breathtakingly obtuse article by Jon Hoffman of the Cato Institute. The article’s title, “Israel Is a Strategic Liability for the United States,” only hints at the venom that Hoffman directs at Israel.

The piece is a lengthy denunciation of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel and of Israel’s conduct of the war against Gaza, which–astonishingly–never once mentions Hamas’s October 7 massacres, or the fact that Gaza started the war. In Hoffman’s view, it is as though Benjamin Netanyahu suddenly took it into his head to massacre Palestinians. The article is too long to deconstruct fully, but here are few typical excerpts:

What exactly the United States gets in return for this unidirectional relationship remains unclear.

Proponents claim that unfaltering support is critical for the advancement of U.S. interests in the Middle East. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, once referred to Israel as the “eyes and ears of America” in the region. While intelligence-sharing may have some strategic value, the past five months of war in Gaza have made clear the numerous negative effects of the relationship, namely how Washington’s emphatic embrace of Israel has undermined its strategic position in the Middle East while damaging its global image.

That’s it: no further discussion of Israel’s role in intelligence beyond the grudging admission that it “may have some strategic value.”

ISRAEL’S CAMPAIGN of collective punishment in Gaza has been historic in scale.

This is libelous. Israel is fighting a war, not engaging in “collective punishment.” Hoffman swallows Hamas’s propaganda, hook, line and sinker.

According to the Gazan health authorities, the official death toll across the enclave is now roughly 32,000 people, the vast majority of whom are women and children.

Actually, most of them are (or were) Hamas fighters. Real experts on urban warfare, which Hoffman plainly is not, say that Israel has achieved a historically low ratio of civilian to military deaths. And that is without taking into account the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from terrorists in the corrupt culture of Gaza.

Across the strip, civilian infrastructure has been systematically decimated, and starvation and disease are spreading rapidly.

This is what happens when you start a war. Hamas’s fighters hide within civilian infrastructure, hospitals being a notorious example, so naturally such infrastructure is damaged. And of course, it is Hamas that has the power to bring destruction and disease to an end by surrendering.

It’s difficult to fathom that this war could get worse, but all indicators point in that direction, as Israel insists that it will continue to push into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, despite U.S. objections, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians—exceeding half the population of Gaza—have fled.

Again, no acknowledgment that Hamas started this war, and that Israel needs to attack Rafah because that is where many thousands of Hamas fighters have now congregated. Can the conflict be ended at this point? Sure, Hamas just needs to surrender. The idea that the hardship that Hamas has brought on its own people somehow requires Israel to accept defeat in the war is ridiculous.

Israel has demonstrated no long-term political strategy in Gaza beyond the systematic destruction of the enclave and killing of its inhabitants. Netanyahu—whose support has reached all-time lows, and who faces growing protests calling for early elections—seems to know that once this ends, his time in power is over.

I don’t know that Israel needs to have a “long-term political strategy in Gaza.” Israel does not have the ability to dictate Gaza’s political future long-term; what it needs to do is win the war by destroying Hamas. If it doesn’t destroy Hamas, Gaza’s long-term political future will be more of the same.

And it goes without saying that Hoffman hates Netanyahu. Like many others, he tries to portray Israel’s war as the creature of the allegedly-unpopular Prime Minister, when in fact it is supported by the overwhelming majority of Israelis. Why? Because of what they experienced on October 7–which Hoffman doesn’t even have the decency to mention–and because of their knowledge that if they don’t destroy Hamas, it will happen over and over again.

There is more at the link, but it is all of the same tenor. To the extent that the Cato Institute is part of the American right, its take on the Gaza war and on the Israeli state is an embarrassment.

Podcast: The 3WHH, To Obscenity and Beyond

We recorded a day early this week on account of Holy Weekend hard upon us, so we’re posting it up a day early. And this week’s episode has it all, starting with the lamentable fact that when you hear “porn is everywhere these days,” it included even the Power Line website this week (it was tempting to claim, “We’re just trying to keep up with the public schools”), and then proceeding to the obscenity of the John Eastman disbarment, the disappointment with the 5th Circuit’s decision preventing Texas from securing its territorial integrity, on how best to squash squatters, and a vigorous argument about the legacy of the recently deceased Joe Lieberman. (Steve and John give Lieberman a thumbs-up, while Lucretia. . .)

All three of us independently chose the same article for our picks for Article of the Week—Walter Russell Mead’s Tabletmagazine piece entitled “Twilight of the Wonks.” It has some magnificently harsh language about the leaders of our elite educational institutions, such as “moral jellyfish,” and leaders who are “careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment.” We’re less sure about Mead’s diagnosis of the role of narrow specialization in the decay of our universities and what should be done about it.

At least we have Krispy Kreme donuts coming soon to McDonald’s to look forward to.

As always, listen here, on Ricochet, or wherever you source your podcasts.

An Easter Reverie: The Great Cloud of Unknowing in Christian “Leadership” Books

I was looking through an old hard drive for an academic paper of mine from more than 20 years ago, and I happened to stumble across a long book review I wrote for the Acton Institute in 2000 on “Christian ‘leadership’ books,” and I thought it might be suitable on this Good Friday for a Holy Weekend reverie. I can’t believe I actually read all these books. Anyway:

The church has always been susceptible to having the waves of secular enthusiasm wash over it. In the 1920s and 1930s we saw the emergence of the “Social Gospel;” in the 1970s and 1980s we saw the rise of “Liberation Theology,” which was essentially Marxism with salsa.  On a less political plain, we have seen Christian aerobics programs at the height of the fitness craze, and Christian punk rock bands during the new wave era.  To paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about the writing style of journalists, there is no cultural fad that the Christian subculture can’t appropriate and make worse.

Now the trend of “leadership studies” is in vogue among Christians, and if you take the literature seriously, you would think that Jesus Christ was cut out to be a managing partner at McKinsey & Company.  It probably should not have surprised us that Gov. George W. Bush named Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, or that Vice President Al Gore embraced the guiding slogan, “What would Jesus do?”  (Or “WWJD” for short.)  But Jesus as marketing manager, or human relations consultant?  Try out this sample: “It struck me,” writes Laurie Beth Jones, author of Jesus CEO, “that Jesus had many feminine values in management and that his approach with his staff often ran counter to other management styles and techniques I had both witnessed and experienced.” Or this, from Bob Briner and Ray Pritchard’s Leadership Lessons of Jesus: “Jesus was both the greatest manager and the greatest leader of all time, and both His management skills and leadership abilities should be prized and emulated.”  But what about His goals?  You would hardly know that Jesus is the Savior of man from most of these books.  He seems more like F.W. Woolworth instead.  Can the salvation of mankind through incarnation and crucifixion really be appropriated for the purpose of selling widgets?

I am reminded of a competency hearing for a bumbling surgeon at a southern California hospital many years ago, where the surgeon in the dock explained that “Jesus guides my scalpel.”  To which the chairman of the board of inquiry replied: “I’m sorry, He’s not a licensed practicioner in the state of California.”  So, too, we should wonder whether Jesus will really make His second coming at the Harvard Business School.  The pablum that appears in many of the Christian leadership books makes me wonder if we haven’t mistranslated the New Testament passage where Jesus overturns the tables in the temple.  More likely He was upending the tables at the Christian Booksellers Association convention.  (Sometimes these books even snipe at each other.  Charles Manz’s generally superior book, The Leadership Wisdom of Jesus, distinguishes itself from Jesus CEO by noting that “it focuses on visionary leadership, while the focus of this book is on empowering rather than visionary leadership.”  Well, glad we got that cleared up.)

Before going further I must pause and offer full disclosure along with some background.  I am the author of a book in this genre, Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity (Prima, 1997).  As I confessed in my Preface, I first thought the idea of writing a leadership treatment of Churchill was ludicrous, but changed my mind for two reasons (well, okay, three reasons—the financial blandishments of the publisher were not an inconsiderable factor).  First, Churchill was totally and surprisingly absent from the best-selling “leadership literature.”  One book from Harvard University Press, for example, goes on about Hitler for seven pages, while Churchill is not mentioned at all.  Second, it became clear to me in reading leadership literature that the example of Churchill stands in opposition to the popular understanding of leadership today, which emphasizes a highly passive understanding of “leadership” whose most prized value is “consensus.”

Churchill would have called the leadership precepts of our time “mush, slush, and gush.”  In fact, one “total quality management” instructor told a person who brought my book to class that Churchill was an unacceptable example of “linear dichotomous absolutism” or “LDA.”  When unpacked, this cloying flotsam of jargon means that Churchill believed in objective reasoning (“linear”), that good could be distinguished from evil (“dichotomous”), and that evil should be opposed (“absolutism”).  Seems to me the world could stand a bit more “LDA.”

In short, I came to realize that a genre of literature that included Attilla the Hun and Mafia dons would sooner or later get round to considering Churchill, and would probably get it all wrong.  Rather than let some nitwit write about Churchill, I decided I had better do it myself.

The second observation that should be made is that there is a positive side to the popular fascination with leadership.  The growing interest in leadership represents an implicit rejection of bureaucracy, of the Progressive Era theory of administration, both public and private, that sought to reduce management decision-making to a scientific process that doesn’t require the personal characteristics or insight that we associate with leadership.  In this organizational scheme, managers are as interchangeable as any other moving part.  Think of it as the logical extension of Frederick Taylor’s famous time-and-motion methods: not only are workers reduced to robots, but also executives.  In other words, the impersonal forces of matter, rather than the personal forces of individuals, were thought to determine the shape and direction of progress in the modern world.

The coming of “systems analysis” and other sophisticated quantitative methods seemed to complete the repertoire of scientific management, and its slow undoing can probably be traced to the first instance of its use in running a war—Vietnam.  But that is a story for another day.  Suffice it to say that the revived interest in the importance of personal leadership for organizational success represents Max Weber’s revenge.  Weber, the theorist of bureaucracy par excellance, nonetheless had misgivings about his project, warning that bureaucratic rule would turn into “mechanized petrifaction,” and that bureaucrats would turn out to be “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”  Weber’s provisional solution—“charismatic” leadership—didn’t work out too well for Germany (despite what Harvard University Press authors think), but his basic judgment may still be right: “Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.  But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well. . .”

On the surface, much of the leadership literature can be criticized as simplistic or merely obvious—driven more by the hucksterism of the American publishing industry than any real intellectual insight.  (I think it was Woody Allen who quipped that if Immanuel Kant had been American, he would have written The Categorical Imperative—And Six Ways to Make It Work for You!)  There is very little in most leadership books that an executive wouldn’t learn in a basic human relations or organizational behavior course.  Leadership books, and especially the circuit-riding gurus who take up an entire day of your time instructing you on time management, have been rightly dismissed, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge do in The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus, as little more than faddism, chichés, one-part motivation, one-part plain common sense, one-hit wonders, and less. G.K. Chesterton remarked that there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell, and the difference between Tony Robbins and Tom Peters often seems slight indeed.

But this is the least of the problem.  The trouble with most of the contemporary literature and teachings about leadership, however, is that it still partakes of the viewpoint of value-free social science that is the very heart of bureaucratic theory.  In other words, the escape from bureaucracy is incomplete.  Instead of leadership based first and foremost on moral character and clarity of purpose, the most highly prized trait of “leadership” today is the ability to forge “consensus” through “non-coercive models of interaction.”  In this model, “hierarchy is out, and loosely coupled organic networks are in.”  One of the most popular definitions of “consensus leadership” is “an influence relationship between leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes.”  Such definitions make it possible to go on at length about Hitler’s leadership abilities.  It raises new possibilities for a sequel to my Churchill on Leadership, such as Stalin on Leadership: The Complete Guide for the Command-and-Control Executive.

 You would hope that the sub-genre of Christian leadership treatises would eschew the value-free approach to the subject precisely because of the centrality of moral and ethical character at the heart of Christian teaching.  But you will be disappointed.  “Jesus had a plan and adhered to it unfailingly,” Bob Briner writes in The Management Methods of Jesus.  “He knew where he was going, and he went there. . . Whatever the consequences, he would go to Jerusalem and carry out his plan.”  Nothing about what “the plan” entailed (i.e., the salvation of mankind); it might just as easily be a Super Bowl coach’s game plan.  Nothing about the fact that being God incarnate might provide you with a little more foresight about how the plan will unfold (wouldn’t you love to have Jesus’s predictions of the Fed’s interest rate plans??)—a benefit that none of us have today, even though a lot of executives think they are God.  Laurie Beth Jones (Jesus CEO) even has a chapter with the lesson that “He Knew That No One Could Ruin His Plans.”  Of course, it helps to be omnipotent.

Nothing is more important that hiring quality employees, but these books tend to elide over what a personnel manager would doubtless call “the Judas problem.” Judas is understandably a cause for some embarrassment in these chirpy books, but thankfully none offers a chapter about “Surviving the Judas Employee.” “True,” Briner writes, “one of the twelve betrayed him, but I wish I had been successful in selecting the right employee eleven out of twelve times.” Jones writes of Judas’s betrayal: “This experience is common to many of us in business, in friendship, and in romance.” Just as Jesus Himself might have put it in a sales meeting.

This could go on, as could a roster of titles that we can expect from the publishing industry.  With 2000 years of church history to work with, the permutations are nearly unlimited. The Reformation?  A mere proxy fight for control of the church.  The Crusades?  An inspiration for traveling salespeople.  Gothic cathedrals?  The WalMarts of their time.  How about Martin Luther on Leadership: How to Wage a Proxy Fight and Win, or The Jesuit Mode of Leadership: How to Fend Off a Proxy Fight and Win, or Venture Capital Lessons of the Council of Trent, or The Thirty-Years War as a Model for the Coke-Pepsi Rivalry, or St. Benedict on Business: The Quiet Way To Climb the Corporate Ladder, or Savonarola on Leadership: How to Fire Up Your Stakeholders, or How to Profit from the Prophets: Putting Predestination to Work in the Commodity Futures Market.  When Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned about “cheap grace,” he had no inkling of the possibilities in the world of publishing.

 It is not impossible to derive from the scriptures some edifying insights into the world of commerce, as indeed the work of the Acton Institute shows.  To make a genuine contribution, leadership literature should impart something of the substance of the person in question, and how that substance affected their character, their thought process, and the decisions they made.  This was the approach I tried to take in writing about Churchill, and is the value, for example, of Donald Phillips’ Lincoln on Leadership.  So it is important to single out the two books that stand above the typical tripe of the Jesus-as-manager genre of books.  Richard Phillips, who has an MBA from Wharton, chose King David as the subject of The Heart of an Executive: Lessons on Leadership from the Life of King David.  The first thing you notice is that, at 272 pages of small type, this is a real book.  And of course since Kind David was an actual political sovereign, his life and actions bear some reasonable resemblance to the real world that we can see or imagine.  From this book a reader will learn a coherent account of King David’s life, as well as lessons that can be applied in a serious way.

 James C. Hunter’s The Servant: A Simple Story about the True Essence of Leadership is also a welcome departure.  Hunter is a real live senior executive rather than a consultant of some kind (as are most of the authors of the other books here), and The Servant is a straightforward narrative of what he learned by retreating to a monastery when his life and career were at low ebb.  Nothing here about what depreciation method Jesus would use.  It is, however, a moving affirmation of the value of contemplation, and its focus on the Christian virtues makes this book an oasis amidst the desert of Christian leadership studies.

 Hunter’s book confirms what ended up being the final judgment of my own work on Churchill: Questions of leadership are ultimately questions of character. To adapt the Jesus of the Gospels for the purpose of restating basic maxims of personnel management and human relations not only trivializes the Savior, but also make a hash of leadership properly understood. If we had genuine truth-in-advertising laws, most of these books would be called The Cloud of Unknowing. But that title’s already taken.

 Books discussed in this essay include:

Bob Briner, The Management Methods of Jesus: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Business (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996).

Bob Briner & Ray Pritchard, The Leadership Lessons of Jesus: A Timeless Model for Today’s Leaders (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1997).

Bob Briner & Ray Pritchard, More Leadership Lessons of Jesus: A Timeless Model for Today’s Leaders (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1998).

James C. Hunter, The Servant: A Simple Story about the True Essence of Leadership (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1998).

Laurie Beth Jones, Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership (New York: Hyperion, 1995).

Charles C. Manz, The Leadership Wisdom of Jesus: Practical Lessons for Today (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1998).

Richard D. Phillips, The Heart of an Executive: Lessons on Leadership from the Life of King David (New York: Doubleday/Galilee, 1999).

Bontasaurus Wrecks

California’s Chino Valley School District has established a policy of notifying parents if their children start “transitioning” to a different gender.  California attorney general Rob Bonta is suing the district on the grounds that the policy:

has placed transgender and gender nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures. These students are currently under threat of being outed to their parents or guardians against their express wishes and will.

Gender identity is not a choice, and it is not a mental illness. It is an essential part of one’s identity and being, and cannot be voluntarily changed.

And so on. As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of biological science and the law?

In the state Assembly, Bonta was the prime mover of Assembly Bill 2088, which would have taxed former Californians 90 percent of their in-state levy in the first year after they left the state and 80 percent in the second year, phasing out over a decade. Bonta, a Yale law alum, believed it was legal to tax non-residents for ten years. The state AG now believes that telling parents about their children’s attempt to transition causes irreparable harm. As it happens, those parents have been subject to harm on other fronts.

Last year officials in the city of Reedley discovered an illegal Chinese bio-lab jostling with bio-engineered mice, potential pathogens, samples of infectious diseases including malaria, and hazardous chemicals. The lab posed a clear and present danger to all Californians but Gov. Gavin Newsom ignored it.  Attorney general Bonta acknowledged the lab’s existence but filed no criminal charges.

If  Gavin Newsom somehow makes his way to the White House, Rob Bonta, born in the Phillipines, would doubtless be Newsom’s “historic” choice for U.S. Attorney General. So despite what people might think, there could be an AG worse than Merrick Garland.